


Broken

by SuperPailyDhampirLove



Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 19:09:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9840044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuperPailyDhampirLove/pseuds/SuperPailyDhampirLove
Summary: Nick started off as a cool dad, playing with his little girl Paige, but what happens when tragedy strikes? What will happen to their family, and the bond between father and daughter?





	

Nick broke the speed limit on the way to the hospital, banging a recycling bin. Lucy, his wife, screamed from the back seat. Not out of fear for her safety but from the contraction in her womb.

Sixteen hours later Nick held his daughter awkwardly. His eyes red with tiredness and wet with tears. He felt like he’d been over a waterfall in a barrel. Disorientated, upside down, but acutely alive. He lifted his eyes and looked at his wife with awe. He felt complete. They named the baby Paige.

With a job that took him away a lot he lived for the moments he’d return and play with Paige. He’d notice the subtle changes to her face, the alertness in the infant’s eye, and the new sounds starting to take the shape of vowels and consonants.

As a teenager Nick spent his spare time surfing. He wasn’t a great athlete, but he could catch a good wave. Now, at thirty one, a marketing consultant and family man he didn’t get to the beach very often, but when he did, he thrived.

The swell that day was big and the wind was blowing off shore hollowing out the waves, before they’d crash hard against the surface. The outgoing tide pushed a strong current underneath. He wouldn’t usually go out in such conditions but if he missed this opportunity it would be another couple of weeks before he could again.

His heart beat hard as he watched the sets for a while, deciding the perfect moment to paddle out, riding the rip in behind the break. He waiting then pushed hard to get over the crown of his first wave. Nick grinned and whooped as he accelerated down the wave. He was flying. Then, nothing.

Paige was playing with matchbox toys on the kitchen floor when the phone rang. A saucepan boiled on the stove, cooking a lone egg. Her mother’s eyes narrowed as she listened. Her face dropped. Nick was unconscious in the hospital following a surfing accident.

At the hospital Lucy listened to the doctor. The outcome was severe brain damage. The likelihood was that Nick would have significant physical, neurological and mental impairment. He wouldn’t be able to walk again, would have significant short term memory loss, and be almost entirely dependent on others on a daily basis.

Paige scrunched up diabetes information flyers in the foyer, as Lucy spoke aloud to herself. “We’ll get on.”

“Where’s daddy? Where’s daddy? Where’s daddy? I want daddy mummy,” Paige said pulling at her mother’s leg.

Paige kept her distance at first, staring at Nick unconscious in the hospital bed. To Paige the oxygen mask, tubes and beeping machines connected to Nick made him look like a spaceman. “Is daddy going to space?” she would ask.

Paige's urge was to climb on the bed, but the sight of Nick held her back. She couldn’t understand the dramatic change, though Lucy and others had tried to explain. "Daddy’s sick. He’s having a big sleep,” people told her.

Nick woke from the coma twelve months later, and spent several months in hospital in rehabilitation.

“When are you taking me home?” he asked Lucy. All the support agencies were in place to help them adjust when Nick would finally come home.

“Daddy won’t be able to walk again, Paige. We need to look after him.” Paige watched Lucy unscrew the top of a bottle and pour another drink. Someone said to her that she was now the 'man' of the house and had to look after her mum and dad, though at six years old she didn’t know what that meant. She felt the weight of the comment like a metal band squeezing in on her head. She stayed in her room a lot and at night she often heard her mum on the phone crying.  
Soon after Nick's return home Lucy realised she couldn’t cope with the demands of being a mother to Paige and carer to Nick. She organised a separation and Nick went into supported accommodation.

Lucy visited a couple of times and each time Nick always asked when she would take him home again. She couldn’t bear it and soon began going out with someone else and stopped visiting Nick. Rose, Nick's sister took the job of organising Paige's visits to her dad.

Paige watched his auntie park her car out the front and he walked towards the car, that familiar feeling of nearly being sick started again and her began to stress. “Hi Paige. Ready?” Rose asked her as they drove away.

They arrived at Nick's unit, his support worker had bought biscuits and left them on the table. Paige sat on the floor reading a comic, a present from Nick to distract her while Nick and Rose talked, before Rose said, “Okay then, I’ll leave you guy for a while. See you in a couple hours.”

Paige's face went red, feeling the awkwardness will the room, then finally she said, “How are you feeling dad?”

“Pretty good. Pretty positive actually. I’ve been doing a computer course. How’s school?” His voice was strained and muffled, Paige found it difficult to make out the words, but managed.

“Okay.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Nothing much.”

“What sport are you doing now?”

“I told you last time dad,” Paige said becoming agitated, “Soccer. Can we go to the park?”

“When Rose gets back. Sorry, you know. I can’t.”

“Yeah, I know dad.” Paige had another biscuit and picked up her comic again. Nick felt like he’d been turned into a spider. Maintaining a good relationship with Paige was harder than anything else and he wanted it desperately.

Lucy and Rose laughed at the mess in the kitchen. They’d been preparing food for Paige's twelfth birthday party all morning. Lucy’s new husband Matt set up the drinks. Nick was coming, and Rose and her three kids. Paige invited two of her friends from school, though only because Lucy said she should. The neighbours said they’d pop in too.

Paige sat in her room waiting, hoping two o’clock wouldn’t come around. “How do you stop time?” She thought. She rolled her eyes upwards, scrunched her shoulders and flinched her hand back, a sequence of nervous movements she'd started doing involuntarily a few months ago. She couldn’t help it, and because of it kids at school laughed at her.

“C’mon Paige, people are arriving. Come out and greet them,” Lucy shouted from the kitchen.

Paige and the other kids were kicking a ball around the backyard when Nick arrived. Rose operated his electric wheelchair. It didn’t fit through the new passageway in the house, so Rose had to bring Nick down the driveway and around the back to get him to the birthday table set up on the lawn.

“Who’s that?” said Hanna, one of Paige's friends.

“My dad,” Paige replied bluntly.

“How come he’s in the wheelchair? He sort of looks funny.”

Nick was smiling. “Hi kids,” he said faintly. The muscles in his neck were tightening over time, that’s all.” Paige went over to Nick. “Thanks dad.” She took the present. “C’mon let’s eat.” Paige used the controls to drive Nick's wheelchair to the table. Her friends watched. “Cool,” said Hanna.

Paige sat at the head of the table with her friends either side. Nick was down the other end with Rose, who offered food to him, wiping his mouth occasionally. Paige rolled her eyes and scrunched her shoulders, trying to hide her ticks by looking away at some non-existent point of interest. Under the table her hands stretched back, straining the tendons and ligaments. Lucy served ice cream cake while Rose and Matt cleared the table.

Hanna started to giggle. “Gross!” She chuckled. “That’s so gross.” Paige's other friend started to giggle too. A large melt of ice cream was running down Nick's chin onto his shirt, front and arm. Drips pooled onto the table. Paige wanted to be back in her room, or somewhere much further away. She flushed, "Yeah," she said, and started laughing too. She felt safe in the laughter even though it felt fake. She was with a group sharing a joke, sharing a feeling of revulsion, making Nick a stranger. She felt ashamed at herself for laughing, and angry at Nick for being disabled. Rose wiped up the mess.

Next weekend Rose arrived to pick up Paige, "I don’t want to go," she said. She pushed her face into her pillow.

Years later Paige and her friends, Shana and Mona, stood waiting to catch the bus to Glenwood, all holding a can of beer in their hands. The bus yet again was running late, but the girls didn’t mind, hollering at cars driving past, receiving rancid gestures in return. 

A wheelchair bound man rolled up behind them, drool trailing down his chin, as Paige's father had down at her birthday all those years before. On his shirt a name tag had been clipped. It read, Hi I’m Stuart, please don’t judge me for who I am.

Mona and Shana snickered beside him, “oh look, he’s resorted back to a baby.” Paige tried to laugh with them but felt a pain in her chest.

“Don’t be jerks, he can’t help it!” Paige exclaimed and both girls laughed at her.

“Oh, you wanna be like him do ya?” Shana asked.

Paige ignored her, watching as the bus rounded the corner, and pulled to a stop in front of them. All three of them got on, while Stuart stayed on the curb side. The driver had lowered the disabled platform for him and was now becoming impatient, speaking angrily towards Stuart.

“Maybe he don’t wanna get on,” Mona muttered to the others.

“Or maybe he’s forgot where he’s goin’” added Shana laughing.

Paige started to get agitated, did she want to help him or would she rather make a laughing stock out of him? She decided it’d be better to help. “Maybe we should help him on, he seems distracted.”  
“Pfft, why should we help him, he can’t even help himself.” Shana chimed, smirking out the window to where Stuart still was.

“Not his fault, any one of us could turn out like him.”

“Ha, yeah right. It won’t happen to me.”

Mona stayed quiet, sipping her beer quietly.

Paige stood up, “It could happen, you don’t know. But screw you guys, I’m going to help him.” She dropped her can on the seat, it had yet been opened, and walked down the aisle. Jumping off the bus she walked over to Stuart. “You getting on this bus?” Stuart only nodded, unable to speak. Paige smiled and stood behind him, wheeling his chair onto the platform.

When Stuart was safely on the bus, Paige wheeled him down to the a wheelchair spot, as she walked away she eyed the spare seat beside him but shaking the thought from her mind and returned to her seat.

“Suck up,” Shana murmured, as the bus drove away.

A few days later Paige sat in the lounge room in front of the fire and tried to imagine what a leader would have done. She twisted the top off a stubby, and took a long sip, crinkling her nose at the taste. She didn’t like the bitterness. She'd prefer coke but imagined her friends looking at her, egging her on to have a beer. She swallowed another mouthful, she should have punched Shana for being such an asshole. But who was she to talk? She had better things to do, didn’t she? What was the point? Nick forgot most of what she told him a week before, and they couldn’t kick a football around together or anything. Shit.

The wind blew through the gaps in the window frames. Paige moved closer to the fire, putting her feet on the hearth. She fed another couple logs into the flames and fixed her eyes on the red coals. Grey ash dropped off, protruding smoking embers above blue green fire tongues that flickered out of miniature white hot caverns. Paige watched tiny burning worlds slowly disintegrate. She imagined she saw a man in a wheelchair floating on the water. A huge wave was bearing down. The man paddled, but the wheelchair was sinking, pulling the man under. She saw herself swimming under water to watch the wheelchair and man slowly sink. Dappled sunlight bubbled across the man’s face. She watched from a distance as the man sank through the dark water below.

Paige's eyes began to water. She recalled a dim memory of the day Nick was brought home after being in hospital. She was six years old. Even though things had been explained to her over and over, she'd still thought, hoped that her dad would get better when he got home and that he could start playing with her again, and that her mum would stop crying so much and stop staring at things with that spooky look on her face.

The van had pulled up outside and she'd raced out to meet it. “Stay back here Paige,” her mother had said. “Wait.” But she didn’t want to wait. The man opened the back on the van and Paige saw her dad, her father, there, in a wheelchair. Still looking weird. Still injured. She felt her lip tremble. “Oh no,” she’d thought. She felt let down, disappointed. It was real: Nick was all those things Paige had been told to prepare herself for.

Nick's one good eye caught Paige and he smiled, “hey Paige,” he’d said, his voice weak.  
Paige gave her father the welcome home card she’d made.

“I fixed up your room. Well, we all did. Made it easier for you,” she said, the disappointment showing in her voice.

“Thanks sweetie. It’s good to be home.”

A log shifted in the fire place causing a shower of sparks to spiral up the chimney. That was ten years ago. Paige hadn’t seen Nick for four years, not since after her twelfth birthday. Her eyes watered. She wanted to have a dad. Seeing that guy on the bus a few days before brought it all back. She should have let Shana have it. Maybe that’s what a leader would have done. She spoke aloud to the fire. “Why did you have to be disabled?” Hearing her voice surprised her and she felt stupid, but there was no one else home and she didn’t give a fuck anyway. It felt good to say the words. “Why can’t you be a real dad? What about me?” She felt a glow in her chest. “Can’t you see yourself? Can’t you see how embarrassing it is for me? I need a father.” Tears came to Paige's eyes. She was confused. She felt angry and sad. But it was more than that. She had holes in her that sh wanted to fill; questions to be answered. People who knew her dad before the accident had told her bits and pieces, like small parts of a big puzzle. He was a great surfer. A great dad. Worked hard. Had lots of friends. “He loved you more than anything else,” someone had said. It made Nick sound like a two dimensional person, like a comic book character. She always doubted whether people were telling her the whole story. She wanted to know what her dad’s thoughts had been, what he thought was cool and what wasn’t, the mistakes he’d made. Maybe he drank too much. Maybe he wasn’t a great surfer. “I want to know you dad,” she said to the fire. “Dad,” she repeated. She hadn’t really said that word for years. “Dad.” It felt good to let to word fall from her lips.

“Let’s go to the beach, mum.” Lucy hadn’t even gotten out of the car when Paige asked, leaning in the car window.

“What? It’s winter, and I’ve got things to do.”

“I want to see where it happened, dad’s accident.” Lucy saw Paige's eyes pleading with her, “I want to see the waves mum.”

Lucy watched Paige walk up to the rocks at the end of the beach. The winter cold bit hard. She remembered the day Nick had gone out surfing. Much warmer than today she thought. “Back at six,” he’d said, kissing her. “Love you.” Just like any other day. Then wham.

Paige's gaze moved from the horizon to the fishing boats coming back from their day, to the swell out the back, and then to the breakers. She'd never surfed, though she’d always wanted too. Lucy never gave her a board, and her friends weren’t into it so there was none to borrow. It had always been a fascination. She envied the guys at school who lived near the beach, who went out every day before and after school. She even bought a surfing magazine once. She loved the photos. Looking at the transparent turquoise waves and the surfers in them gave her a kind of vicarious exhilaration, and they fed her intense curiosity about her dad. Like an itch you couldn’t resist scratching.

As she watched the waves today at the beach she tried to imagine her father that day on the board. How did he lose it? Was he cutting back against the line of the wave, or was he going straight down the front? How did he fall? What hit his head? The board? What was he thinking just before it happened? Paige imagined Nick's brain, a lump of soft grey tissue protected from the hard edges and shocks of the world by a few millimetres of skulls and some gristle. That’s all that there was between having a normal dad who could walk, go to work, remember things, go to the toilet on his own, feed himself, help out around the house… and the dad he has now. A few millimetres. But that wasn’t enough that day.

Paige's gaze followed a rise of water glide from out the back in towards the shore morphing in to a wave as it sucked up water, curved over and pounding down on top of itself. A piece of kelp surfaces briefly and then disappeared into the turbulent chaos of water and foam. Boom. Fffssshhh. She imaged Nick's brain banging into his skull, the sinews of tissue and nerve that carried the brain’s messages stretching, straining and snapping. What was the last thing he saw before it all went back? “I gotta see him,” she spoke aloud.

Rose organised the visit. She picked Paige up and they drove to Nick's new unit a few suburbs away. “He’s missed you,” she told her as they drove, filling the silence. She told her Nick shared his place with Max, an ex-car dealer whose head went through the windscreen in a car accident. “He’s a nice guy,” she’d told her.

Rose dropped her off. “Pick you up at five,” she told Paige softly as she drove off. Paige looked at the unit. There was a raised garden bed full of flowers and other plants, Paige thought they must have been herbs, in the small front yard. A cement path circled the bed and a ramp led up to the front door. She stepped up to the door and knocked, she was nervous as well.

Max answered the door. “Nicko, your mates here!” Paige thought if rusty barbed wire had a voice, Max’s would be it. Croaky. “Come in,” he continued, “wanna coke?” Nick came into the lounge room then, easing some pressure off of Paige's shoulders. “Don’t worry,” Max said jokingly, “he won’t bite.”

“I might,” laughed Nick. Paige shook her father’s hand. It was larger than she remembered, and with a firm grip, though the skin was soft. Nick held Paige's hand in the handshake for a while, looking at her. One of his eyes was looking off to the side while the good eye locked onto Paige's. “What have you been up to son?” he asked.

Paige felt ashamed that she hadn’t been to visit, but Nick didn’t mention it. His memory was shaky, to him Paige might have been there last week. The conversation was slow because of Nick's and Max’s speech difficulties. Nick talked about his gardening class, and football, and computers; as well as what he did before the accident. Max told stories about his car selling days. “Normal stuff,” thought Paige. Max and John laughed a lot, teasing each other. “They look like pretty good mates,” she thought to herself again.

“It’s good you’re here,” said Max. “I can’t keep your dad from misbehaving. And he snores. A well as goes for the pies! There’s no hope for him.”

Paige was feeling more comfortable now. “Maybe I can help you keep him out of trouble then,” she smiled at Max.

Sitting there with her dad brought flashes of memories to Paige. The memories weren’t of actual events but of feelings, of familiarity. She couldn’t pin it down to a time or place, just that she’d been doing this before. Being with his dad. It was still him inside.

The conversation slowed after a while. Paige was running out of things to say, and Max and Nick began to tire. Max’s eyes closed and he drifted off to sleep, still sitting up in his wheelchair, arms folded, head resting forward. Nick's eyes glazed over, and there were times when Paige thought she didn’t understand what she was saying or even hear her. They sat in silence.

Paige collected the glasses and rinsed them in the sink. She looked at Max and her father. A line of saliva was dribbling out of Nick's mouth onto his chin. Paige felt queasy. Retard, the word came to her mind. She thought of Shana and Mona laughing and the guy at the bus stop. Shana. What a dick. They’d done a lot of things together. Smoked cones, partied, given teachers a hard time, been suspended for ripping off the canteen. Threw donuts in Shana's brother’s car one night, pissed off the heads, Mona screaming in the back seat, “Another one! Another one!” Shana had always taken Paige further than she wanted to go. Paige had never really stood up to Shana, and it was easier that way. They’d had some good times, but in the bus that day Shna had been a real dick.

The saliva stretched down from Nick's chin slowly toward his shirt collar. Paige wished Rose would arrive and mop it up, but it was only four o’clock. She wiped down the kitchen bench. “Dad,” she spoke quietly, “dad… you’ve got some…” Nick didn’t stir. Paige picked up the dish cloth, rinsed it out and walked over to Nick, hesitated then threw the cloth back in the sink. She looked around for something else, a tea towel? “Tissues, there must be a tissue here somewhere,” she whispered aloud. There was a box on the book shelf. She lent over Nick and wiped the saliva, it made her feel a bit sick, but inside her, in her heart she felt good. She felt the reward that comes with helping. "I’ve done a good thing," she mumbled allowed to herself, a private smile to herself. She felt tenderness toward Nick. A caring feeling, maybe it was love. Retard. My dad the retard.


End file.
